Vocabulary
Roll, Bap, Cob, Barm or Breadcake? Britain's Most Divisive Word
No question divides England more sharply over a shorter distance. Barm in Manchester, breadcake in Leeds, cob in Nottingham, bap in the Midlands and Northern Ireland, roll almost everywhere else — and people hold strong opinions about all of them.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
What do you call a small, round piece of bread for one person?
Imagine it is plain and served beside a meal or used for a sandwich.
- Roll
- Bun
- Bap
- Cob
- Barm
- Batch / breadcake
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Roll
Expected in 20 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.